Was 4K a Lie?

[CaptainZalo]

In short; Be patient and let the software evolve. 
Whining like a spoilt brat that just got an ATV for christmas and not a unicorn pony serves noone and makes you look like an internet bads. 

Pine people promised nothing but cheap hardware _capable_ of a lot of things. Like Lenny and MrWizerd says:  Chillax. A lot of us in the community are spending our free time for the better of the rest. Have patience. Be constructive. Contribute.

[Toriless]

It can play 4k vids right now, but it's not capable of outputting 4k via the hdmi. Basically you can play 4k vids on a 1080p display. Not a lie, although maybe a bit shady

They will play extremely slow if you use a SW decoder but with HW decoding it will downscale 4K video to 1920x1080 at 60 Hz except the audio stutters after a few seconds of playing.  I have five or six video players installed and the results is always the same.  I have not tried a 4K monitor yet.

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No one has lied to you.

... there is a nuance between potential realization on the one hand, and state-of-the-art final product on the other. Is the hardware capable of 4k, yes... is the hardware, your monitor of choice, and the current state of software|drivers capable of realizing 4k (maybe not).

That's not a lie...  these are still development boards and the software is still catching up with the hardware. Folks are a little frustrated right now because the PineA64 is not the plug&play appliance they thought it was going to be... you know... a three thousand dollare media center for $15 bucks !/.  Sometimes I wonder how people assign their expectations.

I invested in a fabulous SBC for $29 via kickstarter... I had NO expectations... my board arrived and I began experimenting... its been a blast and I've learned alot ( and the community has been a joy to get to know , and I'm including tllim! ). The on-line help has been fantastic, the software and hardware expertise I've experienced here is exemplary, and this little SBC is really phenomenal , honestly , top rate... but, its not an appliance yet... and its still under development ( and I'm helping with that ).  I'm inviting you to join us.

Be willing to beta test. Get involved with suggestions, or be willing to try new ideas that aren't fully ironed out.  Keep the faith, its going to be a great ride... and... eventually, you will see 4K on that Android image of yours...

marcus

What pile crap that is.  You can build a HTPC that runs reliable in HD for a few hundred not a few thousand.

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Again, this is not a lie, nor misrepresentation, or shady.  The Hardware you were sold is perfectly capable of playing 4k video, at 4k resolutions to a 4k screen.  The software that you were NOT sold, that runs on the boards, has not gotten to that functionality level.  The board was sold to you as capable, this is not a lie.  The software that google has provided you for FREE is also capable.  You are more than welcome to write the functionality into the FREE opensource software that is not SOLD to you by the company that created the pine64 development board, that you backed/ordered, and then you will get the functionality you desire.  Has someone else done this work for you yet? No.  Is this "shady, a lie, or misrepresentation? Absolutely not!  You were sold a development board, that is what they call beta hardware in the hardware world, They told you the boards capability and what operating systems it could run.  None of this was false advertisement its just the ins and outs of dev boards.

If you want to sit around and wait to have someone else polish one or more of the different operating systems you wish to run, with the functionality you wish to have, please quietly be patient.  If you want to help and contribute but do not know how to code, then beta test the software on this development board, and put in bug reports to assist those who are working on what YOU want, AND THEN providing it to the community with NO REQUEST FOR COMPENSATION!  That is one of the biggest things I don't think all these complainers understand, these operating systems are mostly being worked on by people at there homes in there spare time, NOT as a job.  Yes I believe that Android is being worked on by the company that created the Pine64, but they are also getting help from normal Joes that are doing it for free in there free time.  

I don't understand why people do not understand this, I did when I first looked at the Kickstarter, I was 100% aware of what I was getting into, up to and including NOTHING, that is absolutely nothing, this whole campaign could have flopped and my money would have vaporized and I was aware of that.  Instead I received a pretty well polished development board faster than any other Kickstart campaign reward, from any other campaign I have EVER been a part of.  I have gone on to back a similar intel x86 based board with equal expectations, though I backed that one to the tune of 650 dollars, and ALL that money can equally disappear with nothing to show for it.  That is the nature of Kickstarter, that said, they have delivered the hardware.  Please give them time to deliver the particular flavor of the android software you wish to run.   Understand that it is not all on them either, part of the problem was with allwinner and there not publishing there code as they were legally responsible to do.  Not to the people at Pine, but to the whole world at large.  Understand that in these development boards that there will be delays and bugs, and THATS JUST in the hardware, they are also working on the software to run on it, and that is a huge undertaking.  People compare this stuff to the RaspberryPi and they don't realize that in the beginning of the Pi, they had these similar issues, and the reason there are so many polished software applications for it is because the people who bought them wrote them.  Not because the people at RaspberryPi association or whatever worked tooth and nail to deliver software for the board for every flavor of whatever software that people wanted.  It's first off not feasible.  Microsoft for instance writes OS software for PC computers, while they do have some hardware they develop you don't see a lot of intel or amd owned operating systems do you?

Simply put, be patient your asking for the moon and you may not realize it because you may not understand the nature of development boards or beta programs.

It simply not possible to code a driver given the lack of information Pine provides.

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If you look at the Raspberry Pi it was the same thing. They did take  awhile to get to where they are now (things got interesting with Pi2 and more solidified).

If you do look at the software releases regarding the Pine64 you will notice that they mark them as Beta at this point. Eventually everything will become stable.

On The Linux side with the BSP kernel we are missing 3D acceleration but everything else is pretty stable (these things run great as web servers and light desktop systems but when 3D Acceleration lands it will be great as media center OS too).

Remix OS needs a little time to iron out a few bugs and some optimization (build iin more out of the box drivers support for various usb peripherals and fix the slow ethernet bug which has been identified and fixed on the Linux side of things and can be used for Remix Development).

Android has seen great improvement since the beginning (we have had 5 versions thus far and we are currently on version 6 also known as Beta 2).

These bugs will be ironed out soon enough it's just a matter of having a little patience. Read up on Pi history and you will see that the Pine is progressing/maturing at quite an impressive pace.

Remix has no functional Ethernet or WiFi.  It is junk.  Andriod is working unlike ReMix.

[MrWizerd]

You sir obviously are reading things that are not written, and assuming things you apparently know little about and while your responses to all most all of are posts are snarky and rude boarding on trolling, I instead of pointing out this and leaving it kit staying your obits mistakes gotrespond only to your comment regarding mine. This tidbit you likely either misunderstood or didn't read answered your comment.

"Understand that it is not all on them either, part of the problem was with allwinner and there not publishing there code as they were legally responsible to do. Not to the people at Pine, but to the whole world at large."

The main chip is manufactured by allwinner, if you look it up they have not released there code that is supposed to be open source so do that things like drivers and such can be made. The DRIVER that was released, was done so in the last weeks and has NOTHING to do with pine. Pine doesn't have the chips binaries because they didn't get released by allwinner. Follow this link or search allwinner gpI violations

http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations&ve...XVWvhMf1PA

Honestly, you act as if you know how all this works and that pine ifs caught on some vast conspiracy to lie and steal your money. The hardware is capable, please, do the right thing here... Research, read, help, but don't complain, I am trying to be polite and not say anything presumptuous about you... So .. Just.... I don't know, re read, or ... Something....talking about building a type for a few hundred dollars when the comment clearly was on regards to an entire entertainment center, or straight missing or ignoring my comment about allwinner... It just seems your throwing days at all or our posts hoping one argument will stick or something... either way it's hard to be serious about it taken as a whole so I have clarified. Allwinner, has failed to release binariesfor there chip. Drivers are the hardware manufacturers domain IF they change the components, the allwinner chip is sick and there reasonable for there drivers and even if they went because it was modified, there failure to release the original binaries precludes ANYONE from writing new drivers until someone reverse engineers the drivers, that were on this case unavailable until a few weeks ago.

Understand?.... Hardware from allwinner is capable, but they are the responsible entity for your complaint NOT pine.

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And sorry I just can't resist, if I'm not mistaken pine is not who is working on the remix os is it? I was under the impression it was a separate third party similar to the chrom os port. Am I wrong, misled, or just supplied with old news

[montero65]

Just FYI MrWizerd, that link doesn't work.  Here is the corrected link:

http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations

I'm curious though, if this is a known issue with Allwinner, is there a reason why Pine still went with them?  Reading that link, it seems that Allwinner have been getting worse, not better.  Is there not another chip manufacturer that could have been a better choice?  What chip do people like RPi or others use?  I have zero knowledge on this side of things, so if this is a dumb question, please excuse my ignorance.

[Terra854]

I'm curious though, if this is a known issue with Allwinner, is there a reason why Pine still went with them?  Reading that link, it seems that Allwinner have been getting worse, not better.  Is there not another chip manufacturer that could have been a better choice?  What chip do people like RPi or others use?  I have zero knowledge on this side of things, so if this is a dumb question, please excuse my ignorance.

Well, i think that the Pine64 folks decided to go with Allwinner because of their cheap SoCs. If they used other SoCs (like the Broadcom SoC used by the Raspberry Pi), the Pine64 would have cost more than $15 USD, possibly even more than the Raspberry Pi.

[montero65]

OK, that's kind of what I was thinking might have been the driving factor, cost. If went with a more expensive chip, couldn't advertise as the $15 computer, so might not have been as marketable.

[MrWizerd]

OK, that's kind of what I was thinking might have been the driving factor, cost.  If went with a more expensive chip, couldn't advertise as the $15 computer, so might not have been as marketable.

Yeah, on this point I truly have no knowledge and couldn't speak for them, but yeah my guess is that it was a monitary one.  The chip does do as it says, and they have forwarded out the drivers, which are now available to download, but I don't know/think they have released the binaries as they are supposed to.  I am not a IP lawyer or anything just a layman, but it does seem that Allwinner could be forced to comply with the agreement, I don't know if they can be sued as its all GPL I don't know who exactly would claim to be agreved by there breach, or if it would be a class action or what. 

But the up shot is the chips for now are cheaper than others, and are more capable then others at there current price point.  This is good for all of us as we get the higher power for less but unfortunatly it makes developing for it a little harder, and take a little longer as everything has to go through Allwinner to get the drivers or whatever for the different operating platforms, if they require hardware acceleration.  I am assuming this is why it currently does not do 4k well is because it is not currently benefiting from hardware acceleration.

And thanks for fixing the link, no idea why it truncated like that.

[xalius]

AFAIK the only technical reason why there are no 4K images at the moment is, that the 4K resolution requires different memory layout (framebuffer is larger...) and hence a tweak to the kernel and other associated things are required which could break stuff and is a bigger development effort. That is a separate issue to 3D or video acceleration. A lot of people seem to mix up those two anyways. We have a ARM Mali GPU for 3D acceleration, which is a memory-to-memory accelerator (reads screen content from memory and writes changes back) for mostly OpenGL stuff, this requires a binary driver based on sources from ARM, and additional DRM compatible display driver stack. Then we have a Video Engine that can accelerate video decoding and encoding for various formats and has been reverse engineered for Linux as http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus. The official binary driver for the Video engine is CedarX from Allwinner... you can use Cedrus already with mplayer for example to get accelerated video under Linux... For KODI there is work in progress since KODI requires a certain interface for video acceleration to work: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=254202

[Bendito999]

AFAIK the only technical reason why there are no 4K images at the moment is, that the 4K resolution requires different memory layout (framebuffer is larger...) and hence a tweak to the kernel and other associated things are required which could break stuff and is a bigger development effort. That is a separate issue to 3D or video acceleration. A lot of people seem to mix up those two anyways. We have a ARM Mali GPU for 3D acceleration, which is a memory-to-memory accelerator (reads screen content from memory and writes changes back) for mostly OpenGL stuff, this requires a binary driver based on sources from ARM, and additional DRM compatible display driver stack. Then we have a Video Engine that can accelerate video decoding and encoding for various formats and has been reverse engineered for Linux as http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus. The official binary driver for the Video engine is CedarX from Allwinner... you can use Cedrus already with mplayer for example to get accelerated video under Linux... For KODI there is work in progress since KODI requires a certain interface for video acceleration to work: http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=254202

Is there any way to get 4k monitor output yet from the pine64? (don't even care about fancy hardware acceleration, just want  a desktop driving at 4k even 30hz is fine). Just trying to find a conclusion to this. Thank you.